1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method and an apparatus for selecting media files, in particular, to a method and an apparatus for selecting media files with at least three keys.
2. Description of Related Art
Along with the rapid advancement of information technology, digital electronic products, such as digital cameras and digital video cameras, have been broadly applied in our daily lives. These digital electronic products are usually used for capturing various media files, such as pictures and video files etc. On the other hand, along with the capacity expansion of hard disk and memory, the number of media files stored in a digital electronic product has been increased. Thus, it takes a lot of time and energy for a user to select from a large quantity of media files and adjust the orientations and resolutions of these media files.
For example, the pictures taken with a digital camera may be in different orientations due to different shooting angles (for example, taking landscape or portrait pictures) and have to be adjusted. In addition, the pictures taken usually have various contents and in large quantity due to different shooting environments, techniques, and personal preferences, but the user may want to select and keep only those important or good pictures and delete the others, then the user has to inspect, select, or delete the pictures one by one, which may be very tedious and time-consuming.
Most commonly adopted methods for selecting media files are to adjust and select media files by using buttons in picture viewer software. For example, a media file is selected by clicking the elements, for example, buttons, menus, and toolboxes, in a software interface with a mouse, or the media file may be further rotated, adjusted, deleted, copied, or saved as a new media file (i.e. selected) by pressing down a hotkey on a keyboard (for example, “Ctrl” or “Alt”).
For example, two methods are usually used for selecting pictures through picture viewer software, wherein one method is to delete those unwanted pictures, and the other method is to select those needed pictures and save them in another folder. According to the former method, while inspecting the pictures, those unwanted pictures are deleted by pressing down the “Delete” key on the keyboard or a “delete” button on the software interface, and those pictures in wrong orientations are adjusted by pressing down the “rotate left” or “rotate right” button on the software interface. However, according to this method, it is impossible to save all the pictures after some of the pictures are deleted, and it is very time-consuming to press down the “delete” button and the “rotate” buttons repeatedly.
According to the latter method, while inspecting the pictures, similarly, the orientations of pictures are adjusted by pressing down the “rotate” buttons; however, while selecting the pictures, the pictures are copied into another folder by pressing down a “copy” button or by dragging the pictures into the other folder. When the pictures are in large quantity, it is very complicated and time-consuming to perform foregoing actions of “rotate”, “copy”, and “paste” etc repeatedly.
Additionally, if such a media file selection mechanism is established in a remote operation environment (for example, 10 feet), a remote controller has to be used for selecting the media files. Thus, according to the conventional technique, navigated control is performed through the direction keys on the remote controller in order to select, delete, or rotate the media files, for example, a menu or an option is selected through the direction keys on the remote controller and the menu or the option is entered through an input key on the remote controller, and which is also very complicated and inconvenient.